Ringo: CU Buffs best in nation at winning on a budget -- really

Former Colorado athletic director Mike Bohn, right, and CU student Kyle Tompane sing the school fight song before a football game in 2007.
(
JOSHUA LAWTON
)

University of Colorado Chancellor Phil DiStefano fired athletic director Mike Bohn in May, in part, because he said he wanted the athletic department to be run more like a business.

Yet, somehow this week the Buffaloes won a national championship for doing exactly that in the 2012-13 academic year.

Yes, a national championship.

I find it deliciously awkward that this national title is actually called the Excellence in Management Cup. I honestly couldn't make this up.

Mike Bohn, you're fired.

We don't like how you're managing our athletic department.

And take your Excellence in Management Cup with you.

Each year the Laboratory for the Study of Intercollegiate Athletics at Texas A&M University evaluates every school in the Football Bowl Subdivision to see which athletic departments are winning the most conference and national titles and spending the least amount of money to do so.

Basically, the study says no other major athletic department in the nation did more with less than CU in the past year.

Don't feel alone if you're just learning this is a thing. I just found out this week, too. Though I find it curious that I didn't find out from CU. This is something about which the school and the athletic department should be proud.

Several of the other schools who did well published press releases about their success on their websites.

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CU won the coed national title in skiing and a Pac-12 Conference title in men's cross country. Multiple student-athletes also won individual conference and national titles. Meanwhile the department was enduring a $7.5 million shortfall because the program that pays all the bills -- football -- was in shambles.

Don't ask me how Oregon and the gazillion dollars it spends on uniforms, facilities and running backs from Texas finished second in a competition that rewards departments for maximizing efficiencies. The Ducks clearly are not pinching pennies.

I'm trusting that the folks at LSIA know what they're doing. It is an accredited program at a respected school after all and this isn't the first year they have done this.

According the LSIA website, the scoring method "awards more points to athletic departments that win conference and national championships while efficiently allocating money to win these championships. Other championship cups do not address natural competitive advantages given to universities that have higher operating budgets and play more sports."

The lab was started in 2003 and it has been awarding athletic departments for maximizing resources since 2009 with Utah State, Kent State (twice) and Akron winning previous titles.

Anyway, you can understand why CU hasn't made a big deal about this the way it normally might under different circumstances.

It's hard for the powers that be up there at Regent Hall to celebrate the accomplishment when the man who led the department most of the year was fired for, ahem, not doing any of this.

To be fair to DiStefano, there were some perfectly justifiable reasons for firing Bohn. The state of the football program in recent years is one. The $7.5 million deficit the department incurred last year is another. The public relations debacle of the Jon Embree firing and the circus atmosphere around the Butch Jones interview process in December were still more.

But DiStefano didn't choose to emphasize those points when he explained his decision. He chose to highlight wanting improved fundraising and business management of the program as his reasons.

Two months later, the people at the LSIA at Texas A&M have made his explanation look silly with a study that says CU was operating its department more efficiently than anyone in the nation.

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